Field
The described embodiments relate to techniques for securely communicating content among electronic devices. In particular, the described embodiments relate to techniques for communicating content among electronic devices in a secure, distributed device-to-device network.
Related Art
The Internet is an increasingly popular public network for exchanging information or content among individuals and organizations. In particular, the wide-spread availability of the Internet and increasing bandwidths is allowing individuals to access a wide variety of content via an ever-increasing number of applications. For example, many individuals use so-called ‘social networks’ to exchange information with large groups of people, including their friends, family and colleagues. These social networks allows users to stay in touch with and to rapidly disseminate information to the groups of people, and allows uses to discover new friends and colleagues based on the information other users publish in the social networks.
However, the same strengths of social networks can also be liabilities. In particular, the same ease of access and the ability to exchange information with a large group of people can make it difficult for users of social network to control access to the information that they publish on the social networks. For example, many social networks leverage the published information to generate revenue, such as by selling the published information to third parties, and by analyzing the published information to provide advertising and promotional offers to the users.
Fundamentally, there is a conflict of interest between individuals' desire for privacy and the desire of providers of social networks to make money. Thus, even though some social networks provide privacy settings that ostensibly allow users to control who sees or accesses their information, in practice the privacy settings typically do not allow the users to restrict or limit how the providers of the social networks use the published information. Or, as it has sometimes been stated, when a service offered by a provider of a social network on the Internet is seemingly ‘free,’ you are the product, not the customer. The inherent tradeoff between privacy and the convenient service provided by social networks is often concerning and frustrating to users, which can degrade the user experience.